


Genesis

by nicayal



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Fire, Gen, Hollow Bastion, I go back to all the places I've known; I knock hard but no one's ever home, Nobody - Freeform, One Shot, Post Regeneration, Radiant Garden, Rebirth, So on the way down I'll watch you burn, nobodies - Freeform, the art of losing isn't hard to master
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 12:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4392443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicayal/pseuds/nicayal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone knows about Roxas and the mental grey he came into the world battling. No one thought to ask Axel the same questions about his own awakening.</p><p>Axel/Lea post-BBS, pre-COM/Days one-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genesis

In the beginning there was the Word, and it was a name. It spoke to him like a lover, warm and familiar, but wholly different than he remembered. He woke in its affectionate, welcoming embrace, but couldn't find it in him to reciprocate, to accept it as his own.

He couldn't find it in him to do anything other than stare at his own body, prostrate in front of him, and wonder if he was supposed to feel something about that too.

In his final moments, he didn't remember being alone. He was now, his only company the other empty shells of those who had been with him at the end, however long ago that was. It was his end as much as theirs, he supposed, although he hadn't had the apparent fortune to remain among the dearly departed like everyone else.

No one was with him when he woke again, memories swirling like petals of garden flowers caught upwind. There were names among these many incorporeal corollas, of scientists and security guards, off the top of his head. There were names of teenagers and children who'd had their futures wrested from them in a fit of rampant violence. Vaguely, he remembered the terror. If he listened closely enough, he could still hear fragments of their ineffectual screaming.

None of this meant anything to him.

For a time, he remained within the castle's ivory walls, strolling, hands clasped behind him at the small of his back, chest bent subtly forward as if there was substantial weight between both shoulders. There were bodies everywhere. As he passed them, sometimes he heard the whispers, the torpid half-life residuum of what had once passed for thriving humanity.

He remembered some of the shells that remained, the ghosts of their voices prompting the ultimate revelation that he'd been left behind. In their own grey imprint way, they mocked him because, though he hadn't succumbed to death, what he'd become was far worse. Even in these early moments of his burgeoning rebirth, he had an inkling of this indisputable truth. Heat was a paresthesia all around him in the tropics of this midsummer month, but his body remained cold and the stench of decomposing corpses hardly registered.

He thought about what he could remember of his childhood, of winning physical fight games about half the time and losing debates of verbal acuity with unrivaled consistency.

He thought of blue eyes and blond hair for the first time in years and wondered if the rest of the world had gone to a similar form of the same hell.

There was nothing left for him within these suffocating, walled confines, yet he found himself angling his aimless wandering toward the main spiral stairs, drawn by something unnamable. Something dark and wrong, just like he'd become.

The iron tang of long-dried blood tickled his olfactory sense, and he took in the rust-red flecks on the first few steps with an uninspired look. They led to longer trails of the life-giving substance, smeared in abstract patterns along the banister and onto the upstairs corridor walls.

He should feel a kinship to this vital fluid, he supposed; it must surely still flow through his own veins and arteries although it no longer seemed capable of warming his physical frame. There was a level of detachment building the further he strode, however, and he couldn't tell if it was the visual trauma of barbarity he'd recently witnessed or simply a new standard state it'd be in his best interests to become accustomed to as quickly as possible.

_"Do you think we'll ever see him again? Ven, I mean."_

He paused mid-stride, considered the remnant memory of his own adolescent inquiry. He waited for the response he knew would come, measured, level. Isa had always been the more logical among the pair of them.

Nothing. Not even the rustle of a light breeze to break the stagnancy of the castle's leaden quiet.

He resumed the path unconsciously plotted when he'd first abandoned his body and the shells of others in the castle's lower levels. It was a familiar route, one he'd taken so many times in his adolescence and youth, often in the company of others — with Isa and Even and Braig by his side. He found himself wondering, thoughts still coldly one-note, whether Ienzo had at least been able to forge a viable escape route.

Or the girl and her grandmother.

_"What makes you think he even remembers us after all this time? Just because you tell someone to memorize something doesn't mean they'll put forth effort to actually do so. People are unreliable."_

Their living quarters were as he remembered them, one side tidy, the other cluttered. For a moment, he remained at the entryway, framed by the sloping stone arches of an ancient door. If he reached back into the recesses of his distant thoughts, he could almost see himself on his first day in this new place, brought to the castle as a sprite-haired child and introduced to an already present Isa who he'd initially pinned as an unmitigated bore. Their room had changed since then, had collected a modest number of belongings as they'd both begun to mature. It was like stepping into a time capsule now, tantamount to traversing sanctified ground.

_"I want to live forever in the memories of others."_

Something was twisting and scraping, dragging taloned claws down from the empty cavern where a heart once pulsed and into both arms; it was prickling at his fingers, tightening the tendons of his wrists. He knew he should take his last look and turn away, leave this place and its lingering ghosts. Like Isa, the logical part of his mind was now acting as tempered counsel.

He took a step forward anyway. Ambling over to what was once his side of the space, spindly-thin arms Dilan once used to mercilessly tease him about rose of their own volition, his focus homing in on one thing in particular — a pair of childish, annular toy weapons.

In a split-second, he decided that if the disembodied voices of each unsalvageable deceased were this set on mocking him, he would do what it took to silence them permanently.

The first spark from the tips of his fingers didn't register surprise; the blazing heat that followed made even less of an impression, and the flames soon devoured everything within their oxygenated reach. All he could do was drop his arms, lifeless at his thighs, and watch the destruction he'd just manufactured without manifest effort.

He surveyed his work, told himself he felt nothing as the heat licked at his legs, his face, his arms.

Not entirely true, he silently amended. He did feel one thing, and that was unparalleled cold. Still. Even now.

The flames were hypnotic, mesmerizing. Some caught on the edges of his already tattered attire, but he felt nothing as some newfound cognitive part of him reduced each licking spark to mere smolders without the need to so much as lift another finger.

"An impressive display." The voice was deep. It reverberated into the hollow cavity of his chest and made his throat clench with a form of unfamiliar tension. "A little histrionic for my personal taste, but to each his own."

Turning, he regarded the newcomer with considerable dispassion. Eyes an unnatural level of yellow, they were fixed on him with a similar impassive expression. This wasn't someone he recognized, nor would he have cared one way or another if he had possessed some form of patent recollection.

"There are others waiting for you, boy. We have a place for someone with your talents in our organization."

Others. Talent.

He said nothing, wanted none of it.

The man turned away from him, eyes glowing as they reflected the red of impending destruction in a room that had once housed two teenage boys with vastly different personalities.

"One among our numbers asked for you specifically," the man continued, his tone thoughtful. "The moon speaks to him as these flames do you."

This made him look up, at least, brows furrowing into a thinner line than they'd already formed when he'd first woken. There was a name on the tip of his tongue, of someone he thought he remembered once being his closest friend, however different their respective personalities and interests had always been. He couldn't bring himself to say it.

The man glanced at him, but didn't turn. "Tell me: what does the darkness call you?"

Eyes narrowing, he set his face in a stubborn expression of subversion. He knew what his name was, didn't need anyone or anything to say it for him. The man returned the look with a level one of his own.

Orange-red flames rose higher. They obscured his view of the man and captured his rapt attention in tandem. While the voices of the castle's occupants had receded with the rise of the inferno, others slipped in between his ears, took up residence in the empty places where childhood memories should have been. They were myriad, amorphous. They were all saying one thing, repeating it like an axiom they wanted him to take full ownership of. Unlike the one he'd been born with, this moniker had an additional syllable.

He considered this quickly. He thought of the girl, her grandmother, of Braig, Even, Dilan, and Ienzo, the youngest orphan among them. He thought of Isa and his penchant for lecturing soliloquies.

He gauged the revelation that he no longer wanted to be made eternal in the memories of others so much as he was inclined to snuff them out entirely, one by insufferable one.

In the beginning there was the Word, and it was a name.

He looked at the man once more, jaw tight as his throat considered the new consonants and vowels of the name his mouth was primed to utter.

_The darkness. It calls me…_

"Axel."

**Author's Note:**

> One morning, I woke up an hour before my alarm was set to go off, one sentence repeating _ad infinitum_ in my restless little head. It turned into the first line in this one-shot (and has a very _b’rashit bara elohim_ / Book of Genesis feel to me, hence the name of this ficlet). There are probably some non-canon liberties taken here with some of the descriptions of what happened. There are probably many, actually.


End file.
